By Paul Dicken
8 March 2010
A new Welsh efficiency drive will foster innovation and collaboration in areas where not enough is being done, the minister leading the scheme has told Public Finance.
Led by the Welsh Assembly Government, the Efficiency and Innovation Programme will bring together local government, trade unions and third sector bodies to shore up public sector resilience to the coming fiscal squeeze.
Business and budget minister Jane Hutt, who will chair the programme’s board, said it would focus on building stronger collaboration across organisations and redesigning services with a greater focus on prevention.
The board would take stock of the improvements that had been made over the past few years, Hutt added, but was about ‘recognising there may be more that can be done in terms of co-design of services, not just between local authorities but also across local authority and NHS boundaries’.
She told PF there were already good examples of service co-design, such as work between Hywel Dda Health Board and Carmarthenshire County Council to integrate community services.
Hutt said the programme was also about saying ‘we are in this together’. It would use the small size of Wales to its advantage, adopting a pan-public sector approach.
‘We will be driving it where we know there isn’t enough innovation and collaboration’, she added.
Launched at a public service summit at the end of February, the programme has been modelled on the Welsh Government’s response to the recession, which has included a series of economic summits to help develop economic policy.
Speaking at the launch, First Minister Carwyn Jones said: ‘If we are to avoid financial pressures turning into crude service cuts, we have to accelerate the pace of change dramatically.’
Jones told the summit that the programme’s aim was to develop a menu of the good practice and systems already in place and then roll out those ideas across the public sector in Wales.
Local government and trade union leaders welcomed the launch of the programme.
The general secretary of the Wales Trades Union Congress, Martin Mansfield, said: ‘As a model, the economic summit meetings have worked well, delivering timely and effective measures to weather the economic crisis.
‘Applying the same principles to the public sector in Wales will enable us to make the same important strategic gains and improve public services.’
Welsh Local Government Association leader John Davies said tackling the issues local government faced could not be done by councils in isolation.
